Partnership

The cluster

HPU4Science is acronym for Hybrid Processing Units for Science and It's
located at the Laboratoire de Chimie de la Matière Condensée de Paris
(LCMCP). We also completely assembled the cluster using only consumer
grade computer parts. It is composed of a central data storage machine
and a heterogeneous ensemble of 6 decentralized nodes. Each node
comprises a Core2 Quad or i7 CPU and 3-7 NVIDIA Graphical Processing
Unit (GPUs) including the GF110 series.

The central machine is called the Master and the decentralized nodes are called workers and numerated from one to six.

The HPU4Science cluster's construction went through multiple stages...

We started by sharing an existing cluster room in chimie paris-tech but electric capacity does not fit with our computers so we had to move to another room that belongs to the LCMCP lab.

We solved the electricity problem in the new room but we had to manage the temperature problem. With one master and six workers in full load the temperature was rising lots and could damage the GPUs. So we installed a second hand air-conditioner which we replaced after that by a free cooling and we changed the cluster installation.